Fudan University, located in Shanghai, China, is one of the oldest, most prestigious and most selective universities in the People’s Republic of China. Its institutional predecessor was founded in 1905, shortly before the end of China’s imperial Qing dynasty.

FUWA (Fudan Intelligent Robot) is a 95cm (3′) tall, 60cm (2′) wide service robot developed at the university, unveiled to the public in 2007. It moves around on wheels and has an LCD touchscreen which allows users to interact with educational or entertainment software.

It has speech recognition software for Mandarin and English, and could be used to help teach English to children. It makes you wonder why we don’t have robots under development in the western hemisphere to teach Mandarin, which has more speakers than any other language (885 million), not to mention China’s fast-growing economic power.